Los Angeles County plans to pay $4 billion to settle nearly 7,000 claims of childhood sexual abuse that allegedly occurred inside its juvenile facilities and foster homes, dwarfing the largest sex abuse settlements in U.S. history.
The mammoth settlement, which still needs to be approved by both the county claims board and county supervisors, is a billion dollars more than what county officials had anticipated as the worst-case scenario to resolve a flurry of lawsuits — and far more than other organizations notorious for allowing unchecked sex abuse have paid victims.
The Boy Scouts of America, by comparison, agreed to pay $2.46 billion. The Archdiocese of Los Angeles has paid out about $1.5 billion for alleged abuse at the hands of Catholic priests. Victims of USC gynecologist George Tyndall got $1.1 billion. Michigan State University paid $500 million to victims of team doctor Larry Nassar.
The unprecedented settlement stems from AB 218, a 2020 state law that gave victims of childhood sexual abuse a new window to sue, even though the statute of limitations had expired.
Many California counties, which are responsible for the care of children in foster homes and juvenile halls, saw an uptick in lawsuits. For L.A. County, it was a deluge that still hasn’t stopped.
Thousands of men and women came forward to say they had been molested or raped by probation officials decades ago while incarcerated as children in the county’s sprawling network of juvenile halls and camps.
Thousands more alleged sexual abuse at the now-shuttered MacLaren Children’s Center, a county-run home for foster children that plaintiffs’ attorneys have compared to a “house of horrors.” A report found that the facility went decades without doing criminal background checks on its staff.
Taken together, the thousands of lawsuits, most of which involve alleged abuse from the 1980s through the 2000s, paint a picture of a government that failed to intervene as its facilities turned into hunting grounds for predators, who held immense power over the children in their custody.
“On behalf of the county, I apologize wholeheartedly to everyone who was harmed by these reprehensible acts,” said L.A. County Chief Executive Officer Fesia Davenport in a statement.
She said the county has worked in recent years to crack down on sexual abuse of minors. Improvements touted by the county include bolstering the vetting of foster parents and probation staffers and winding down the use of group homes like MacLaren Children’s Center.
Davenport made headlines in 2023 when she estimated in a public budget hearing that the county could be looking at $1.6 billion to $3 billion in liability for the roughly 3,000 sex abuse claims it expected.
Her estimate was met with shock and a dash of skepticism from seasoned attorneys suing the county, who said it would blow any previous sex abuse payout out of the water.
Since then, thousands of additional victims have sued, with more coming forward every month. In addition to creating a three-year window for victims, which closed at the end of 2023, the new state law let plaintiffs sue if they were under the age of 40 or had recently discovered the abuse they suffered as children.
The county said the $4-billion settlement covers most — but not all — of the childhood sexual abuse lawsuits. Some attorneys were not willing to participate in the “global mediation process,” and plaintiffs in those cases will be part of a separate settlement, according to the county.
Patrick McNicholas, whose law firm is representing 1,200 plaintiffs, said he was mindful during settlement discussions to reach for a number that would bring some justice to the thousands of victims without bankrupting the county, which serves as the region’s social safety net. He reasoned that the government could stay solvent with a $4-billion payout — and yet it was still the largest sex abuse payout he has ever heard of.
“This is a historic settlement,” he said, noting that he couldn’t find a larger sex abuse settlement anywhere in the world. “It recognizes the horrific harm that has been done.”
Dominique Anderson, pictured above around age 11, is one of the thousands of plaintiffs who sued over abuse at the county’s juvenile faculties. Anderson said when she was around 13, her probation officer’s boss molested her in a motel room.
(Dominique Anderson)
The $4-billion payout will be a huge blow to a county already in tumultuous financial waters, thanks to threats of funding cuts from the Trump White House and the cost of recovering from the devastating Palisades and Eaton wildfires. Davenport has warned that the county government, which has a roughly $49-billion budget, could face “a fiscal crisis” unless hiring is frozen.
County officials have said the money will come from draining the county’s rainy day fund, slashing department budgets and taking out bonds. The county is expected to owe hundreds of millions of dollars in interest on those bonds, which have to be paid off by 2051.
The county said it will pay out the settlement money between January 2026 and Jan. 30, 2030, providing the billions to “independent allocators” who will decide how to divvy it up among the roughly 6,800 plaintiffs.
There have been few criminal prosecutions of county staffers accused of abuse in the lawsuits. The probation department presented the L.A. County district attorney’s office with evidence against two staff members, Thomas Jackson and Altovise Abner, in December 2023. The status of those cases was not immediately available.
Some of the employees accused of being the most prolific abusers were on the county payroll until recently. Jackson resigned from the probation department in fall 2023, ending a 33-year career during which at least 20 women accused him of sexually abused them when they were girls.
